Engineer
by The Die Hard
Summary: I give up. Let's go back to first season. Lex said "his engineers assured him." Hah. Engineers never ASSURE anyone. But good ones do dig deep.


Engineer  
  
"That is a hand print." Lex Luthor's lead engineer pointed at some barely-noticeable indentation on his Porsche with her pen, scowled, and made a note on the clipboard she was never without. Lex's attempt to get her to use a palm computer by leaving a top-of-the-line model in her office had resulted in the computer being donated to the Red Cross.  
  
So Lex just looked at her, unwilling to say something like "that's impossible," which would probably -- no, certainly -- only earn him an engineering lecture. "A hand print?"  
  
"Where someone put a hand," she clarified impatiently, as if Lex were semi-retarded. "The person who ripped the roof off your car braced his hand there, when he pulled up the metal like the lid on an aluminum can of cat food. Not the smartest move in the world -- I would have just opened the door once the pressure was equalized -- but obviously this person is not an engineer."  
  
From the tone in her voice, that was pretty much the worst of all possible insults.  
  
Lex tilted his head in fond bemusement. Doctor Kate Roth was a 50-something ex-NASA engineer, who had been fired (from a civil service job!) after a shouting match that mysteriously left a coworker and her boss in the first-aid clinic. She stood halfway to his shoulder, had thin lips and thick glasses and glorious red-gold hair that she wore in an impatient stay-out-of-my-face cut that Lex longed to stroke and encourage her to grow out, and was terrified to even mention. Gabe Sullivan worshiped the ground she walked on. The rest of the plant workers ran in panic when she stalked the halls with her clipboard.  
  
"A person ripped the roof off of my car?" Lex encouraged, his own hazy memories strengthening and solidifying at that confirmation of Clark in front of his skidding Porsche.  
  
Dr. Roth's withering glare said "duh, genius," but her voice was perfectly professional. "You hit the railing," she traced the crumpled left front, "here. You hit something else," she circled an area more central, "here. And I wouldn't bet a space shuttle on it, but from the shape, I would not say that it was a stanchion or abutment. Also, the water washed away most traces, but there were THREADS caught in the metal. As if whatever you hit was wearing," she worried her lips for a moment, obviously wondering if she were about to be told that she needed to be locked up for drinking heavily again, "flannel."  
  
Lex went so still that Kate turned an unhappy frown on him. Lex barely noticed. "Is it possible," he breathed, voicing the question that had echoed in his head every late night for the past week, "for a person to rip a roof off a car?"  
  
"Well, obviously it is." She gestured at the car. "It happened. There are hundreds, thousands, of cases of people exhibiting extraordinary strength under stress. Grandmothers picking up cars to get them off babies. The human body's muscles normally work in alternation, not in simultaneity, or we'd break our own bones. But burst strength is not the exclusive territory of cats, or our species never would have survived the caveman days."  
  
Lex summoned a Luthor look, and attempted to stare at her. "Is it possible for our species, even with burst strength, to survive the impact of a car at highways speeds?"  
  
Kate looked back at him, considering, and then turned away. "A well trained gymnast or martial artist can dodge a car, even jump over one, even at highway speeds."  
  
"Doctor. That wasn't the question. You said there were threads embedded IN the metal. So whatever -- whoever -- I hit, did not dodge. Is it possible to survive that?"  
  
Doctor Roth had come to Smallville with a small NASA team to study the meteors after the disaster. When the bureaucrats had pronounced them "mostly harmless," she had raged and dredged up a university group that found increasingly disturbing evidence of the effects of high-gamma radiation on certain susceptible individuals. After being fired, she had returned to Smallville, fighting bean-counting government agencies to try to get proper attention paid to the evidence, and ended up working for LexCorp.  
  
Along the way, she had run into some of Smallville's more colorful characters, and learned that the small town was not exactly the hick joint that it might appear on the surface. Thanks to Kate's discovery of a high-schooler's extensive documentation of odd cases, and truly frightening but well-thought-out speculations, Chloe Sullivan had a scholarship waiting at any university she chose, so long as she went into science reporting.  
  
"No," Kate said, distantly. "It is not possible for anyone from this planet, with human DNA, to survive the direct unpadded impact of metal moving at that speed."  
  
Lex walked over to the car, at the place she had designated a "hand print." He put his own hand into the slight indentation, matching the places that might be fingertips Yes, it could be. A hand larger than his own. The startled eyes meeting his through the windshield -- not frightened, not facing death, just surprised. The same eyes, worried but not hurt, over his face, bringing him back to life from what should have been a watery and final grave.   
  
Yes, it was possible for a human to rip a car in half. Maybe.  
  
No, it was not possible for a human to survive being hit by a car  
  
Flannel.  
  
"Doctor Roth," he breathed, "Do you have any explanation for the evidence?"  
  
The short woman glared at him from behind her coke-bottle glasses, making her look even more intimidating, if that were possible for someone who was about the same size and weight as a junior-high-schooler. Lex had made the mistake of smirking at her only once, when he offered to hire her "with an eye toward the meteorite effects you'd been looking at." She had found four code violations and a leaking valve in the plant on her first day, and given him fair warning by turning him in to the EPA only for the most minor one.  
  
"Are you asking for an engineering analysis, or SWAG speculation?"  
  
"Both." SWAG, scientific wild-ass-guess. Lex hadn't heard that since college.  
  
Kate turned back to the car, hugging her clipboard to her in the closest to discomfort he had ever seen her show. "Engineering analysis: you hit something on the bridge where someone had left a flannel sheet. Your rescuer was a large person in very good physical condition, who was terrified enough to access burst strength and not realize that he simply could have opened the door. Assumption: this was the same person who gave you CPR, the farm kid. His size, inexperience, and proximity all fit the simplest explanation."  
  
Easy. Simple. Logical. But she had given him the option of asking for a second explanation. Lex desperately wanted to know why. "And the SWAG?"  
  
Doctor Roth gave him a look of burning ice, the dare-you-to-contradict-me glare that sent his dad's plant spies scurrying. "That this second dent was made by you actually hitting the farm kid, who was tough enough to leave nothing behind except pieces of his clothing, but who was shaken enough to do a truly stupid job of trying to conceal his strength when he left his hand print in solid metal and ripped off the top to pull you out. Would you like to take a cast print to match finger length? I've already checked for DNA, though I didn't really expect to find any after the river bath, and considering the potential resistance to impact, he may not shed skin cells anyway."  
  
Oh. My. God. "What are you ... saying? That Clark is ... that Clark's not...."  
  
"You wanted a SWAG." Kate smiled tightly. "My engineering SWAG is that your farm boy rescuer is not a human being. Very seriously and dangerously not a human being."  
  
Anger flared. "He saved my life! How could he be...?"  
  
Kate shrugged. "You asked. It's hardly as strange as some of the postcards written in crayon about alien invaders that we get at KSC." She ripped off the top sheet of paper from her clipboard. "Here are the figures, if you want to run a simulation. I don't have a proper trajectory analysis, so it isn't conclusive, but if you have anything more powerful than a laptop, the breakpoints ought to be more interesting than the actual data."  
  
Lex started to smirk at her at the mention of the laptop, and remembered better. "I'll do that," he said, carefully. In fact, he was very much looking forward to it.  
  
"I'll have the rest of the analysis for you in an hour or so. Though there isn't really much. Perhaps you can get the center of our attention to come visit, and have some sensor scanners set up. Assuming he wouldn't be able to detect them."  
  
Lex scowled. "You're sounding more and more like a mad scientist, doctor," he said, forcing his tone toward mildness. He'd read "The Man Who Fell to Earth."  
  
"I'm an engineer," she said shortly. "Whatever works." Then she paused, looking over her shoulder on the way out. "You do know I have a week's vacation coming up next month." Her voice could never have been called hesitant, but ... suggestive?  
  
"I pride myself on treating my employees fairly." Lex kept frustrated fury out of his voice by sheer Luthor will.  
  
"Trust me, Alexander, I wouldn't be here otherwise." She turned to face him. "No, my apologies for not making myself clear up front. My husband and I are meeting for a week at our beach timeshare, which I'm certain you already knew. It has, for some reason known only to insane gods, four bedrooms. Perhaps you and your young friend would care to come spend a few days on the ocean? We could, hm, teach him to surf."  
  
Lex went lightheaded. The possibilities. Observations, freedom from the oppression of his parents.... Lex frowned. His parents. Clark was only fifteen. This was not going to work. "He's still a kid. He might be a god-knows-what, but legally he's still a kid."  
  
Kate tapped her foot. "And I am a certified instructor in several dozen fields, despite my particular disagreements with certain government managers, and hardly someone the parents would be afraid of. Does your rescuer have some friends his own age? Would they like to go to summer school for extra credit, if they could do it on the coast?"  
  
Lex felt like his smile would split his face. "Doctor, you're a genius."  
  
Kate threw a hand in the air. The other, of course, still had the clipboard. "I'm an engineer. Make the arrangements. I have work to do."  
  
Lex watched her go, and closed his hand around empty air, smiling. It wasn't empty to him. It was full of power and potential.  
  
It was the future. 


End file.
